Welcome to AdvertCity. Your initial egress into the game may have left you confused and disorientated. This is normal.

A couple things should help you get started. After starting a new game, the city is procedurally generated, and you are left trying to find your small corporate building, behind all the skyscrapers.

You will see the tutorial text at the bottom of the screen. Should you be playing on a computer screen larger than a cellphone, then you may want to increase the font size. This is done in the options, located in the Main Menu. Press the ESC key to access this menu.

You may also want to lower the audio volume and the mouse-look sensitivity. You have options for lowering the graphical options, in case moving through the city becomes sluggish.

Another nice key to know is the the F1 key for all keyboard shortcuts. Here you will find the movement keys are W-A-S-D, which are used with the mouse for changing direction and the mouse scroll-wheel for zooming. To move upward press SPACE key, and to move downward press the left CTRL key.

Move your camera toward the dotted green circle. Try not to lose sight of this circle. Once you have navigated the camera within the circle, then look in the center of the circle for a tiny white building with flag. You will probably have to spin your camera to find it. Click on it, and the tutorial will continue.

Now that you have finished the tutorial, you are wondering what to do. You probably noticed the loan debt, which the tutorial asked you to obtain. Wow, those numbers are going up fast. If only there was a way to stop the game for a minute so that you could read the text on the screen. Horray for you, Chummer, pressing the P key will pause the game for a few minutes.

Your first goal is trying to make some money, which hopefully will let you pay off the debt, before it compounds itself into astronomical, unpayable amounts. You will do this by advertising. The plus-side is you are AdvertCity's only advertising firm, which is pretty rad. In case you forget how to access the bank: Select the "i" button for Happy-Bank in the corp-list, click on the Headquarters button, spin the camera around until you can see the headquarters building, which will also show you the HQ menu, press TAB to go to virtual space, and there is that Payback Loan button. So easy!

Few things to know about basic advertising mechanics:

For each type (or technology) of advertising, there is a cost and a maximum payout, which can be seen in the Technology Menu, and there is also the reputation effect on the corporation being advertised (as well as corps that have a relationship with that corp).

The payout is determined by the population within the building selected, especially for Hand Delivered Flyers, with no range effect, and the population around the building including the roadways, for advertising with range. Each time the advertisement is "seen", then the payout increases, up to the maximum payout. This being "seen" can be observed by the reputation increase in the corporation listing, which ticks-up accordingly.

In addition, the corporate owner of the building is important, too. In this world, the building residents are workers of this corporation. The game does not explain this fact very well, but those corporate workers do not like seeing enemy corporation advertisements. They like to see their own corporation's advertisements, too. Anyway. try to not advertise to the selected corp's adversaries.

Now that you know the mechanics, highlight a corp from the corporation list (such as Desperate Designers), then click on each building with a non-zero population and do Hand Delivered Flyers. If you are fast enough, then you might be able to pay down that bank loan. Otherwise, you'll be looking to restart your game.

After a long while of Hand Delivered Advertisements, you will start unlocking other technologies. I want to point out here that some technologies are more efficient at making money than others. The better ones are actually the cheaper ones! But the margins for profit are smaller, so even though Hand Delivered Advertisements is the best bang-for-your-buck, it is going to take a lot of clicking to bring the thousands of XDG that a bimp can do in one pass. With each building able to receive one of each advertising technology, and with other corporations racing ahead with their profits, you will want to find a balance between efficiency and effectiveness.

In this mid-game, you want to be unlocking all the advertising technologies. You can see which corporations have locked technologies, through the "i" button on the corporation list. The description text will say that there are one or more technologies that "might" be useful to you. You need to either build up your reputation with them by advertising their corporation, or you need to buy them out. Usually, building the reputation is usually easier.

You also want to move yourself into a bigger building to expand your range of influence. Pretty easy. Find a big building in your existing range, click buy, then move your HQ there. You can sell your old building or keep it, but since the goal of the game is property acquisition, then you might want to hold onto it. You probably don't need any more people, so keep downsizing until the wait times are uncomfortable.

Keep advertising, buying property, and trying to muscle into the different corporate areas. You can use the 256SOH headquarters to clear up any reputation negatives that happen. Remember to frequently use the virtual advertisements, too. Anyway, that's as far as I have gotten. Give it a thumbs up, and maybe I will update this later. Good luck, Chummer!